Never Gonna Leave This Bed
by LaughingSenselessly
Summary: "Stiles," she says to him sternly, "what are you doing in my dream?" He blinks and then shrugs a little, leaning back on his elbows to watch her with sleepy eyes. His mouth ticks up mischievously. "It's your dream," he replies. "What do you want me to do?" (Or, the one where Lydia dreams about Stiles for once. Well, twice. Thrice- okay, yes, it's becoming a problem. Season 3A.)
1. Never Gonna Leave This Bed

**A/N:This is the drabble I never wrote before but the idea inspired the plot for my fic Witched. (This one-shot is in no way related to that fic however, like, at all. I just had a burst of inspiration last night to write it. Fair warning: it's probably trash.)**

 **This fic takes place before the whole parents kidnapped/ritual sacrifice thing of 3A. keep that in mind ;)**

* * *

Lydia's eyes fly open. Her bedroom is dark, just as dark as it was when she fell into it hours ago.

She's struggling to figure out why she woke up when she hears someone stir beside her. Did she bring someone home last night? That would be strange, it was a school night and she'd been exhausted after an evening of research into the whole Darach business; but still not impossible-

She turns and it's Stiles, blinking blearily at her from his side of her bed.

She stares at him. He stares right back.

She looks down at her fingers. Six on each hand, if she really focuses and counts them. So unless she suddenly acquired polydactyly, she is definitely dreaming.

It's a relief and for some reason, a disappointment. She can't believe her mind is betraying her. She's dreaming about _Stiles_ for god's sake.

"Stiles," she says to him sternly, "what are you doing in my dream?"

He blinks and then shrugs a little, leaning back on his elbows to watch her with sleepy eyes. His mouth ticks up mischievously. "It's _your_ dream," he replies. "What do you want me to do?" He waggles his eyebrows like a fucking idiot.

And yet she's suddenly far too aware of the way his cotton shirt stretches across his broad chest, the bed-hair so rumpled from sleep, the muscles of his forearms from where they're resting across her (their?) pillows. "I want you to leave," she hisses, turning away abruptly when she feels an unwelcome fluttering sensation in her chest. "Go. Poof. Don't exist here."

She can practically hear the pout in his voice. "Aw Lydia, don't be like that," he whines, and suddenly his arm is snagging her around the middle and she's unprepared for this so she lets him pull her on top of him, so that she's straddling him, and suddenly she doesn't know what to do with herself at all.

Her hands have automatically reached for balance, settling on his chest, and her legs are on either side of his torso. He's smiling lazily up at her, his own large hands ghosting up her sides.

She's shocked at how right it feels, how solid his weight feels beneath her, how nice his long fingers dancing on the edge of her night shirt, how his smile is making her feel warmer than it really should.

When she doesn't move, he seems to take that as encouragement; in one sudden move, he's flipped them over, and now it's Lydia underneath and him straddling her on top, with one forearm braced at the side of her head and the other trailing down her outer thigh.

To distract herself from the sudden and unwelcome sparks his fingers are leaving, she says, "I'm dreaming."

He leans down and begins nuzzling at her neck. "That you are." He sounds amused.

"I'm dreaming about Stiles in my bed," she elaborates.

His nose rubs against her cheek, and- is he just rubbing his face against against hers like a fucking _cat_? That should not be as hot as it is. She tries to turn her head away, but then he just buries his nose even deeper into where her neck meets her shoulder, his hands sliding up and under her shirt just slightly. "Also true," he says, and the sound is muffled.

She wishes the window was open all of a sudden. "I'm _fantasizing_ about Stiles _Stilinski_." She tries to sound disgusted, but it comes out a little more breathless than intended.

His hands, now on the skin of her hips, are sliding up slowly, inch by inch, and it's driving her mad. He finally moves from her shoulder where he's been nudging at and looks her in the eye. His whisky-coloured eyes are bright, even though there's almost no light streaming from the window. "Exactly," he says with a little, sideways grin. "Know what the best thing about a fantasy is, Lyds?"

She shivers a little at the way the nickname falls from his mouth, playful and casual and loving and a little sinful.

"You get to do whatever you want with me," he answers for her in a whisper, and then he's leaning in and he's kissing her, and the way he kisses her isn't tentative at all like she might expect. No, he kisses her like he knows exactly what he's doing, like he's kissed her a thousand times before. He gets right _to_ it. One of his hands is tracing the underside of her breast and the other has since disappeared and finds itself tangled in her hair like that's home, and he's nudging gently at her lips with his tongue until she can't help but open up and yeah, this isn't so bad.

She starts getting into it herself, letting her one hand thread itself through his hair and tilt his head so she can access his mouth properly. And when she runs her other hand down his back, dragging with her fingernails, he makes this little mewly sound and arches his spine, so their torsos are flush against each other.

His lips are full and soft and just the right mix of patient and intentful on hers. Now his hand that was on her breast is traveling down and slipping under the waist of her pants and she's nearly panting against his mouth in anticipation. God, this may be the hottest kiss she's ever experienced and she's just making it _up-_

Her alarm goes off.

They break apart, breathing heavily. The room flickers from dark to light and back.

Stiles groans and leans his forehead against hers as the alarm continues to blare distantly in the background. "You couldn't set your alarm for ten minutes later?" he whines, like he's been looking forward to getting her off. It doesn't help matters down there.

When she doesn't provide an answer, he sighs heavily and sets one last brief, chaste kiss against her lips. "Well, good morning," he says, winking cheesily, and then he's gone, and Lydia Martin is sitting up in bed with flushed cheeks and an ache between her legs and the morning sun is winking at her through the window like it knows exactly what was going on in her head.

"Shut up," she grumbles at it, and gets out of bed to yank the blinds shut. The room darkens instantly, but she's still breathing unsteadily. Who knew fantasizing about Stiles could be so…

 _Hot_ , her brain supplies; _Amazing_.

She shuts that whole thought process down before it can go anywhere, and wanders into her washroom to get ready for school.

When she gets to class and sees him, she tries her best to act normal. And yet, she can't help but think that Stiles' eyes linger on her a little too long when he walks into Ms. Blake's class, and the way he flushes and looks away when she catches him is a little more spastic than usual, and the look in his eyes when they lock gazes again later, talking about something entirely mundane, entirely mirrors how she thinks she's looking at him.

It's puzzling, to say the least.

 _What if we had the same dream?_ her brain supplies as a question out of the blue. Almost immediately Lydia shakes herself and laughs at just the thought of the concept. She and Stiles sharing dreams? Now _that's_ the most ridiculous thing she's ever heard herself think. Like, really.

It's not like they have a mental _connection_ or something _._

* * *

 **A/N: I'm sorely tempted to write a Stiles POV to this; we'll see if that pans out.**

 **I'm arrowcave on tumblr and you should totally leave a review ;)))))) *winks at you* *does finger guns while walking away backwards* *trips on the trashcan i normally reside in and falls back inside head first***

 **EDIT 10/23/2015: Second part is happening. it'll be more of a continuation. Stay tuned ;)**


	2. Life is but a Dream

**Part 2/2. This is more of a continuation than a simple POV switch. Hope you like! :)**

* * *

Stiles is usually, like, 90% sure he's a real person. Maybe 95% sure. Somewhere between 90 and 95, in any case. It doesn't matter. That's not the point here.

The point is that the other possible option is that he's a figment of someone else's imagination. And really, no one should ever try to get him started on why that might actually be the case, because once he got stoned at a party and went off on anyone who would listen about how they might _all_ just be figments of someone's imagination- but again, that's not the point here.

The point here is that right now Stiles is 99% sure he's just a figment of someone else's imagination. Lydia Martin's, to be specific.

Because sure, he dreams about Lydia on a regular basis. But those dreams definitely do _not_ go like this.

In fact, he's not entirely sure he has control over his own body. She's peering at him in the darkness, muttering about how this is all a dream, and although he's agreeing with her in his head, his lips stretch into a smile and he's saying things he'd never have the balls to say in real life.

And the weird thing is, she seems to _like_ it.

He watches her pupils dilate when he asks her what she wants him to do. How her breath hitches when he impulsively snags her around the waist and rolls them over and nuzzles his face into her neck like he's always wanted to do, and this part is definitely him. He's overwhelmed with the urge to press his skin against hers- not in a sexual way here, just in that way of warm intimacy, so he can smell her hair, feel her soft cheek against his. It's kind of heavenly.

When she says with an air of disgust, "I'm _fantasizing_ about Stiles _Stilinski_ ," he's not even mad, just a little surprised.

He's pretty sure if this were _his_ dream she'd be a lot more down with it.

So yeah, as soon as he realized (maybe the logic doesn't make sense, but give him a break, he's literally asleep right now) that this was _her_ dream, he threw caution to the wind. Fuck it. Hell yeah, he's a figment of her imagination. He's totally on board and accepts that completely for the moment, doesn't bother to examine the logic behind his decision in favour of trailing his fingers up her inner thigh and listening to her rapid puffs of breath against his cheek, and kissing her lips repeatedly in light, feather-soft touches that provoke sighs.

Her alarm goes off and he groans, screwing his eyes tightly shut at its incessant blaring. "You couldn't set your alarm for ten minutes later?"

She doesn't say anything at all, just breathes heavily, so he opens his eyes and lifts his forehead off of hers. She's staring at him, and even in the dark he can catalogue the look of every feature on her face- green eyes wide, cheeks and lips flushed, hair strewn messily on the pillow. She's fucking gorgeous and he really cannot handle it right now so he just sighs and kisses her, one last press of their lips, and says, "Well, good morning," because apparently this is her dream so he might as well try to get her day off to a good start.

The moment he winks, everything ends.

But, unlike he suspected, his existence continues. He wakes up in his own bed, bleary-eyed and confused, and remembering every small detail of what just occurred in… his own dream?

He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands, trying to make sense of what just happened. Well, it's not a _traditional_ Lydia dream, that's for sure. His brain is really kicking it up a notch with the torture. Honestly, if Lydia is still questioning her attraction to him in his wildest _fantasies_ , what chance has he got with her in real life?

Shaking his head at his own idiocy, he gets out of bed and gets ready for school.

He arrives to his first class with Lydia and makes his entrance nearly tripping over his own feet when he sees her. She's lounging in her seat, wearing an obscenely short skirt with heels and touching up her lipstick in the reflection on her phone. She looks up upon his flurry of movement, and unexpectedly, she doesn't give him her usual "pull yourself together" glance like she usually might in this situation but she's- _is she_ -?

He's standing stockstill in the doorway blocking anyone from coming in because Lydia Martin is definitely blushing in his direction.

And that colour in her cheeks looks so much better in the daylight.

Someone breaks him out of his reverie by shoving him in the back, and he stumbles into the classroom. When he finds balance again, her head is bent studiously into the textbook, perfectly curled hair hiding her features from him. He considers saying something.

He doesn't.

Maybe she was thinking about something else. Maybe some really hot dude was behind him in the doorway. Maybe she had a fever.

(Maybe she was blushing because of him.)

He thinks about it, replays and feverishly overanalyzes the same scene over and over in his head. For the rest of the day. More like for the rest of the week. Not longer.

Because then it happens again.

* * *

He's gone to sleep, collapsed into bed at three in the morning- when he's suddenly blinking, sitting upright in a chair, in the dark. He's sitting at a desk at school in Coach's classroom and he'd think he'd just fallen asleep in class but well first of all, there's no one else here, second of all, he can see the full moon through the window, and third, Lydia is on his lap with her hands on his face, blinking right back at him with great confusion.

God, this just got fucking weird.

He looks at her for a second. She's wearing the clothes she wore to school that day (as is he) and an inscrutable expression. She presses her lips together, her gaze sliding around the room and back before finally murmuring uncertainly, "...Dream?"

This time when she says it, it's not in disgust, but rather curiosity. He figures that's a step in the right direction.

He's suddenly much too aware that his hands rest on her thighs. "Guess so," he replies, leaning back and trying to grasp control of a situation that he's rapidly losing control over. They stare at each other.

It's like she's waiting for him to do something. She's biting her lip, and he can see the way it changes the shape of her lip because his face is about an inch away from hers and he's far too aware of the sound of her breathing because the only other sound is the steady tick of the clock that regularly drives Stiles nuts during Econ tests.

He's surprised when she's the one that leans down and kisses him.

He's not complaining, at all. He goes willingly.

They simply kiss for a long while, the wet sounds of their lips meeting finally drowning out the enraging sound of the clock in Stiles' ears. He doesn't remove his hands from where they rest, but he doesn't let them adventure anywhere either.

When they break free to breathe, she's… just as into it as he is. He can tell by the way her pupils have blown wide, the way she's licking her lips.

"It's just a dream," Lydia says breathlessly, and he can tell she's speaking to herself more than anyone else.

"Dreams never hurt anyone," he helpfully supplies, and he's talking to himself, too.

Mutually reassured, they nod at each other, and lean back in at the same time. He lets his hands wander a little. Just a little. She doesn't seem to mind, if the little gasps are any indication. Meanwhile, _her_ hands are everywhere, in a frenzy, as if she can't get enough- raking over his torso and arms, pulling at his collar so hard he's tugged deeper into her kiss, running fingers greedily through his hair, forcibly turning his head into different angles- with such rapid speed that he can hardly keep track. All he can do is hold on for the ride. She's practically molesting him. He loves it.

Like all other good things, it ends. One minute she's grinding down into his lap and he's attempting to keep some semblance of his cool, and the next it's over, and he's bolting awake on his computer chair. The sun's shining through the window, he can hear his dad walking around downstairs, and he's definitely going to be late for school.

He looks down and sighs. Well, he'll let Coach skin him, because apparently he has to take care of something first.

* * *

It's happened more than a few times now. She discovers through her own meticulous mental record-keeping that the dreams happen mostly when she's stressed, when she's exhausted and falling into bed, and when she's feeling vulnerable.

Everything is normal with him in real life. They smile at each other, talk about the latest brutal murder, and everything is, on the outside, the same. But something has changed. She doesn't know what.

Well, she _does_. It's her. She looks at him differently- she can't help it- and she knows he notices because his glances linger long after she's turned away, staring at her profile and trying to decipher what's going on in her head because that's just what he does.

She kind of hates that she knows him so well.

"Dreams," says the teacher at the front of the psychology class, startling Lydia out of her reverie. "What do they mean?"

Lydia notices Stiles' head coming up from the circle of his arms where he was probably shamelessly dozing, sitting up straighter.

"The Freudian concept of dreams," begins the teacher when no one replies, "was that they mean something more than what happens. He said there's a meaning behind every dream, something that a psychologist would be able to interpret to understand something beneath the surface that _you_ don't even know."

Lydia sits up straighter, and Stiles' brow is furrowed in her peripheral vision, now fully awake.

"But now we know better," the teacher continues. "We know that you can't predict the future from dreams, and you can't deduce anything about their personality.

"Dreams come about because of incomplete information received by our cognitive centres, so our brain tries to make sense of them by coming up with scenarios. It is purely scientific."

"So… there's really no meaning behind dreams?" asks Stiles weakly without raising his hand.

The teacher pauses to deliver a glare for speaking out of turn but replies anyway. "I was getting to that. Freud wasn't completely wrong," she replies, strolling between the desks. "If you're stressed out about a test, you might have a dream that you failed the night before. It's your brain's way of coping, of making up scenarios to prepare you for their happening in real life. Emotions," she adds, stopping in front of Lydia's desk and tapping her fingers absentmindedly on the wood. "Strong emotions, about a particular subject, will often influence your dreams. So yes, there can still be some meaning derived from a dream, Mr. Stilinski. Does that answer your question?"

He gawks, blinks a few times, nods his head furiously, and bends down to his notebook to scribble something down. Lydia sinks lower into her seat.

As the teacher says, "Now let's move on to the five stages of sleep…" Lydia muses about what strong emotion brings about her regularly occurring dreams about Stiles Stilinski.

She settles on annoyance because she doesn't want to think about the alternative.

* * *

More often than not, the dreams are innocent. Happy.

Sometimes they just talk. He wakes up and they're both lying on the school gym floor on their backs, staring at the ceiling. She reaches for him, but he's in a morose mood. It's been a rough day. He kisses her and pushes her gently so that she falls back, but they're still shoulder-to-shoulder. She doesn't seem offended, and they lie there.

He doesn't know why, but after an eternity of comfortable silence he just starts talking.

He tells her about his ADHD. She tells him about her parents' divorce. He tells her about the day he fell in love with her. She rolls her eyes and tells him she's always known.

Another day they wake up in Stiles' bedroom, limbs tangled together, but instead of continuing on with the natural progression that position might lead, he asks her between lazy kisses to play a game of chess with him.

When she settles on the carpet across from him, furrowing her brow at the pieces laid in front of her, it's only a few moves in when she muses, "Since this is a dream, am I playing chess against myself?"

He doesn't know what to say to that. Because he doesn't know if this is her dream, his dream, or if it's real life and he's hallucinating, or something more sinister. He doesn't know, so he just says: "Why do you have to overthink everything all the time?"

"It's a valid question."

"Mmhmm," he says, unconvinced. "The more valid question is, why are you stalling? Can't think of the right move?"

In response, she moves her rook, and Stiles realizes, almost too late, that she's already almost got a checkmate. He quickly gets himself out of the situation, and when he glances up next, he can see that she's impressed.

He grins. "And you were sitting here thinking I was a complete id-" He doesn't get to finish the sentence because she's leaned forward to capture his bottom lip between his teeth, and he forgets about chess for a solid five minutes before they finally start to play again, faces flushed and hair wilder than it was before.

She wins the game, but after a hard-fought battle. Stiles thinks he sees a glimmer of respect in her eyes after he very nearly gets checkmate, but in the end it's her that pumps her fists into the air and shouts joyfully, "Checkmate!"

He pouts to hide a smile, loving her enthusiasm. She's grinning widely, something she doesn't do all that often in real life. He loves when her smile stretches her cheeks, reveals her teeth, makes her eyes sparkle in delight. His imagination is great at creating this image that he's rarely seen, apparently. "Next time I'm going to kick your cute little ass."

She snorts.

It's heaven, he decides later when he wakes up. This place that he has found in his mind- when he falls into bed with every worry weighing on his mind and wakes up somewhere with Lydia Martin bounding forward and he catches her and spins her around and she kisses him, long and hard and sweet, before letting go and saying hello.

He should have known it wouldn't last forever.

* * *

Lydia kisses him in real life, frantically trying to stop his panic attack. His lips feel too familiar.

"Why'd you do that?" he asks, breathlessly, almost sadly, which doesn't make any sense. She scrambles for a reply.

"When I kissed you, you held your breath."

(It was instinct.)

* * *

When he's dead, after his arms stopped thrashing while she held him down firmly until he drowned and died, she sits on a upturned bucket and cries into the cradle of her fingers. The same fingers that shook and slipped on the cold skin of Stiles' throat and couldn't find a pulse so that she could look up and nod to Deaton.

Someone tells her, at some point, to get some sleep. She's not sure she can. Her best friends, the people that are her everything, are dead in metal bathtubs and no one is sure (even Deaton, she can tell by the thin line of his mouth) if they can be brought back.

So yes, she's stressed out.

The only reason she relents, curling up on the couch under Scott's coat, Allison's scarf wrapped around her shoulders, is because if she falls asleep, she can have a piece of Stiles, too.

So she sleeps, soundly.

She doesn't dream.

And then she wakes up hours later and cries again because she understands now. Her dreams won't return because they're not just her dreams; they're his, too.

 _A kind of emotional tether_.

She stops crying after a while.

He hasn't woken up.

* * *

He wakes up, but he's never the same again. None of them are. Their eyes are haunted. She makes light of it, of course, "look who's no longer the crazy one," she says smugly. She's just glad to have the three of them back, but she can't get what Deaton said out of her head. There's a darkness in their souls. There's a part of them, gone forever. She almost didn't believe that, but sometimes when Stiles looks at her, his eyes seem hollow. Almost... void.

She doesn't get dreams about Stiles anymore.

* * *

He still dreams about Lydia.

But not the way he wants to dream about her. He wants tickle-fights on Lydia's huge bed, laughing and shoving and ending in sweet peppered kisses across closed eyelids. He doesn't want what happens now: Not this sick, twisted version of what it used to be like, with her warning him in a seductive murmur that's not her own, begging him not to go to the door. Not these nightmares beginning with Lydia rising from his bed and ending with Stiles screaming because he doesn't know what's real. It makes him sick.

He doesn't want to dream about Lydia anymore.

* * *

Even when they've exorcised the demon from Stiles- and Stiles says this loosely, because he isn't sure if it really wasn't the other way around- he doesn't feel whole. He doesn't feel as full of life as he used to be. Everything's sardonic smiles, weary eyes. Life is void of colour: black and white, muted greys.

(Except her hair. Her hair is still strawberry blonde.)

Stiles doesn't really sleep much anymore. When he's stressed, he usually spends the night staring at the ceiling. But if he _did_ sleep- he does wonder, sometimes- if he closed his eyes, if he'd end up in a bed with Lydia Martin.

He doesn't really trust himself enough to find out.

* * *

It's years later when the dreams start again. Stiles has never expected them to.

But then again, he never expected Lydia Martin to be his girlfriend, but here he is in college, with a beautiful and smart new girlfriend named Lydia Martin, and everyone and their uncle blowing up his phone since they officially got together to express their snide congratulations and tell him about their bets. He doesn't really care. It's been a long day, and he falls into bed and passes out.

It's not his dorm bed, no, it's his childhood bedroom. He still sees the red strings on the board, reaching down to photos and news articles and the blue walls and the well-worn, soft bedspread under his fingers. He's wearing the clothes he fell asleep in, a dark blue tee and print pajamas.

He notices her.

She's next to him on her side, facing him. Her eyes are shiny in the dark.

He's staring at her, and when he speaks, it's both calm yet surprised, but not unfriendly. "Why are you here?"

She doesn't reply at first. Reserved. Which is… different. She was always so free in these dreams. "I don't know," she says softly.

He sighs and sits up straight. "I thought these dreams were over. They stopped after…" he trails off, not wanting to go there right now. She doesn't say anything. Just lies back in the pillows to watch him.

He goes on, staring at his fingers. His head hurts when he tries to count them; he tries several times and then gives up, letting his hands fall back into his lap. "Is this real?" he asks her weakly. "I can't tell anymore, Lydia. It's so hard to tell." His voice breaks a little at the end because he thought those days were behind him for the most part.

She finally speaks. "It's a dream, Stiles."

He exhales shakily at those words. She's not done.

"But that doesn't mean it's not real."

He stares at her and she looks back solemnly, eyes half-lidded in the dark, hair strewn over his pillow and his blankets twisted around her ankles. He laughs, and it's the furthest thing from humorous. "What the fuck does that even _mean_?"

"It means that the tether is still here," she replies, and she says it wonderingly, as if finally realizing something herself. "I thought it was gone, but…"

The tether. Several things click into his head at once, and the reason that dream-Lydia is so real to him suddenly makes a horrific amount of sense.

"You're the real Lydia," he says.

"Yes."

"We're sharing a dream," he says.

"Yes."

"And you'll remember this when you wake up, too."

"Yes."

There's a blank silence. She doesn't say anything else, just looks at him. Meanwhile, he's running through all the countless dreams he's had with Lydia in them since this entire weird thing started.

"Oh my god," he says finally, running a hand over his mouth. "I said _so much_ weird shit to you."

She laughs, the sound burbling up from her stomach, and she claps a hand over her mouth as if she wasn't expecting it to happen. He doesn't think she was expecting him to say that, and he knows there's more significance to what he's just learned, but at the moment he's stuck on the embarrassment of it all.

He rubs his hands vigorously over his face. "How the fuck was I supposed to know that, when I told you I nearly chopped off my finger with a blender when I was twelve, that you were going to actually remember it?!" Her giggling increases and he shakes his head, running through everything he's said… and, oh god, what he's _done…_

It clicks, and he's looking at her with new eyes.

"There's more than a few things I might not have said to you if I'd known it wasn't just a dream," she comments.

"'Might'?" He repeats.

She blinks and her brow furrows, as if she hadn't quite realized the significance of the exact words she'd said. But she shrugs and looks down at the comforter, picking at a loose thread. "Maybe I would have told you anyway." Her voice is soft, vulnerable.

He doesn't know what comes over him, but he places his hand to her cheek gently. "Me too," he admits, then pauses. "Well, I probably would've held off from mentioning the Dungeons and Dragons boxers, but, you know."

Lydia smiles again. She places her hand on top of his where it rests on her cheek and leans into it and Stiles feels like he knows heaven from the press of her lips into the cradle of his palm.

"Lydia," he croaks.

"Shh," she murmurs, and her hand travels up his arm to pull him down. He falls beside her, and she curls up against him.

"Lydia," he says again into her hair, lost. "Why?"

"Either be more specific or shut up," she advises, voice muffled against his chest. He grins.

"Why is this happening again after so long?"

She's quiet. "I don't know."

"But you have a theory."

He feels her nod against his shoulder. "We lost parts of ourselves. I think our tether got lost too." She exhales. "Maybe we just found it again."

 _Maybe we found_ us _again_.

There's no words needed. His arms circle her back unconsciously, drawing her closer. She raises her head and pulls him down for a kiss.

He props himself up on his elbow to return it, one hand cradling her face. Unlike many a dream, there's no ferocity. There's just a heat that's been burning in the back of his soul since the day he met her, and it grows in warmth the longer he touches her.

They're still kissing languidly when the scene shifts and the room falls away, and Stiles dimly registers he's back in his dorm room, the sunlight is streaming through the window, but Lydia is still spread out beside him like she was when they both fell asleep.

"Morning," she says sleepily when they part, green eyes still half-closed. She's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.

He sighs happily. "You know what this means, right? You've liked me since high school."

"Shut up," she says, but it's without heat.

He winks cheesily. "Make me."

She snorts and hauls him in for another kiss, but he's grinning too widely so it doesn't really work for more than a peck. In exasperation, she pushes him off of her, and he falls off the narrow bed.

"Hey," he complains, "that was just rude. I think my elbows are bruised." He lifts his arm to look at his elbow. "You should kiss it better."

She huffs, grabbing her phone from the bedside table and scrolling through her messages.

Well, if she's not going to, he reasons, someone should. He attempts to bring his elbow to his mouth. It isn't working. Huh. He's never actually thought about the fact that he cannot touch his mouth to the tip of his elbow. For some reason, it's infuriating.

Lydia looks down at him at that moment, watching him redouble his efforts from where he's sitting on the floor. "Stiles," she says, "what are you _doing_?"

He seizes the opportunity. "What do you _want_ me to do?"

She throws a pillow at his face. He catches it, laughing, and soon even she can't help but join in.

If life with Lydia is a dream, he thinks happily, he never wants to wake up.

* * *

 **A/N: I'm on tumblr at arrowcave. if you liked this, please consider leaving a review. I LIVE FOR THAT SHIT. Thank you so much for reading :)**

 **EDIT 12/01/2015: There will be a sequel to this fic because I'm a piece of trash and someone gave me inspiration for it. haha.**

 **EDIT 02/28/2016: The sequel is POSTED, but as a separate fic because it got really long. It's called "Voluntary Apnea" and you can find it on my page. Thank you :)**


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